I wouldn't have believed this, but I received killer performance from my website … when I turned off W3TC 0.9.2.8.

I was able to reproduce the same problem, simply by deactivating W3TC. With it on, my domain along could take up to 5 seconds to respond, and the minify local CSS and JS files (since uploading to CDN is broken) were even worse.

Just deactivating W3TC dropped my site load time from 6–10 seconds to 2–3 seconds. No caching at all (dedicated server).

w3tc is terribly broken right now. Originally, I thought I was having problems because of my setup.

After having performed a couple of tests, I've seen that's not the case and that there are some very serious bugs. Even when loading pages from the local machine, it still takes about 146ms to load the HTML of a cached page. That used to take like 5-15ms when loading it from localhost.

The good news is that this plugin may just make me switch away from wordpress. Without w3tc, it's useless to me. It can't handle the traffic I'm getting.